Jeff Koons is currently having a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York. The document discusses Koons' career and artistic style. It notes that Koons is currently the highest selling living artist, with his Balloon Dog sculpture selling for $58.4 million. The document explores several of Koons' most famous works, including Balloon Dog, Michael Jackson and Bubbles, and his current large-scale public sculpture Split-Rocker, which is on display in New York.

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King
Koons
“He has the slimy assurance, the gross
patter about transcendence through art, of
a blow-dried Baptist selling swamp acres in
Florida.” That’s the late, great Australian
art critic Robert Hughes on Jeff Koons. It’s
fair to say that Hughes didn’t rate Koons too
highly. On the other hand a lot of people do.
And as if to prove the point, the Whitney
Museum’s Retrospective on Koons, has
been pulling in the crowds like nothing
on earth, all eager to feast their eyes on
150 objects representing the output of the
59-year-old artist whose career goes back
to 1978 and who’s been dubbed the King
of Kitsch. Even the New York Times, no
cultural pushover, has called the exhibition
“lucid” and “challenging”.
In financial terms Koons is the planet’s
biggest artist, his Balloon Dog (Orange)
having sold for a record $58.4 million at
auction in 2013, leaving the previous holder
of that record, Gerhard Richter, trailing
along more than $20 million behind. It is
this emphasis on the financial that seems
to get the haters out in force. Koons was a
Salvador Dali groupie in his teens, and even
went so far as to ring up, out of the blue,
the most commercially minded artist of the
post-Second World War years at his hotel
in New York. They had tea together. Later,
Koons worked as a commodities broker,
financing his art through his own earnings
on Wall Street. However, “making money is
not my intention” says Koons, whose vacuum
cleaners in acrylic vitrines, reworked
Gordon’s Gin advertisements, balloon dogs
and baseballs suspended in water have made
him very rich indeed.
The last retrospective, 2008’s at the
Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago,
broke attendance records. This one, which
visits France and Spain after New York, is
likely to knock those figures out of the park.
Tulips, 1995-1998
Oil on canvas
Part of Koons’s Celebration series, ongoing
for 20 years, Tulips is one of a number of
either high gloss steel sculptures or, as in
this case, large-format paintings celebrating
childhood. Tulips looks almost traditional
until you realise that it’s around 10 feet (3.3
metres) wide by 9 feet (2.8 metres) high.
And Koons did not paint it; it was produced
by one of the Koons team of more than 100
hired hands who produce all his work, some
of whom have been with him for decades.
Whether this is a cynical work by a cynical
artist or an entirely joyous expression of the
Koons idea of art for all pretty much sums up
the entire debate around the artist.
[ START ]
Jeff Koons is the biggest artist
is the world right now. With
an exhibition at the Whitney
Museum in New York in full
swing, we take a look at the work
that made him the boss of it all.
By Steve Morrissey
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New Hoover Convertibles
Green, Blue, Doubledecker,
1981-1987
Koons’s breakout series The New sought to
bottle the concept of box-freshness. Here
he’s put together a family group of Hoovers
and then housed them in an acrylic vitrine.
This, plus the effect of exhibiting them in a
sterile gallery space, achieves what he set
out to do. However, with the passing of time
the new becomes old and the Hoovers now
look like a nostalgic snapshot of newness
– obsolescence being the flipside of shrink-
wrapped novelty. This paradoxical aspect is
also reflected in Koons’s observation that the
vacuumcleaneris“oneofthemostaggressive
machines you come across if you are one year
old and lying on the floor”. And here they are,
mute, passive artefacts.
Aqui Bacardi
1986
In the Luxury and Degradation series
Koons takes on advertising, particularly as
it deals with subjects often considered to be
vices. Alongside works such as “I assume you
drink Martell” and “I could go for something
Gordon’s”, Koons replays advertisements
that were popular in the mid 1980s as oil
on canvas replicas of the original. Does this
replication make the tone ironic? Or does it
merely plug Koons into an already existing
structure of money and power? Again, the
argument about Koons’s intentions couldn’t
be more nattily represented.
Michael Jackson and
Bubbles, 1988, Porcelain
One of Koons’s most recognisable works,
a representation of Michael Jackson and
his pet chimpanzee Bubbles, rendered as a
tacky porcelain figurine that’s bigger than
life size. Jackson’s mainstream appeal is
what caught the artist’s eye, and the addition
of a pet adds a further layer of kitsch to the
one supplied by the gilding. The sculpture
is part of the Banality series and owes a
debt to Michelangelo’s Pietà – the dead
Jesus Christ lying in the lap of his grieving
mother suggesting the sacrifice that a mass
entertainment performer must make to
stay at the top and the way that pop stars
are regarded by their fans with an almost
religious zeal.
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Balloon Dog
(Yellow), 1994 – 2000
Two things about the balloon dog – surely
one of the most familiar of Koons’s works.
For starters it’s huge – over three metres
tall. And it isn’t a delicate balloon creature
at all. Instead it’s made of stainless steel. If
any work sums up all of Koons’s output, it’s
Balloon Dog, including the astronomical
price an orange one fetched when it went
to auction at Christie’s last year – beating
its estimate of $55 million by $3.8 million.
If that’s slightly outside your price range,
apparently enterprising Chinese gentlemen
will bang you one out for around 3,000
bucks. There’s a 20-day lead time, and
business is brisk.
It looks like a ball fixed in acrylic. In fact,
as the title suggests, it’s a baseball held in
perfect equilibrium in a tank containing
a saline solution. Koons has offered a
rationale for it – that it represents the perfect
state of being, neither up nor down, dead or
alive, but an ideal suspended state of rest.
It’s a perfect piece of three-dimensional pop
art, its lack of political engagement and its
commodification of a brand demonstrates
Koons’ satirical side, and that his rejection
of irony is, in itself, post-ironic irony.
One Ball Total Equilibrium
Tank (Spalding Dr. J
241 Series), 1985. Split-Rocker
Not that we’d accuse Jeff Koons of trading
on past glories, but Split-Rocker is strongly
reminiscent of Puppy, the towering sculpture
of a West Highland Terrier, posters of which
adorn bedrooms all over the world. Split-
Rocker sits in the same spot as Puppy did,
the plaza at the front of the Rockefeller
Center in New York, where it’s part of the
huge retrospective at the Whitney. And it’s
about the same height (at 37 feet or roughly
11.2 metres it’s just a few shorter than Puppy)
and has strong superficial similarities, being
composed of thousands of flowers. Looked at
from the front of this wonky beast, the left
side is the head of a toy rocking horse, the
right side is the head of toy dinosaur, and
supposedly the inspiration came from some
toys that one of the many Koons children
was playing with. “Split-Rocker is different
from Puppy in that it’s a shelter, it’s inviting,”
Koons said at the press conference to mark
its unveiling on 25 June. “You could literally
take shelter there.”
You might be able to “take shelter”
in there if your name is Jeff Koons, but
when something is worth squillions of
dollars (Puppy cost $100,000 a year in
maintenance alone, Split-Rocker is unlikely
to be cheaper) you’re not going to let Joe
Public blunder around inside it. But if Mr
Public could get inside he’d find a network
of hoses, structural beams, pumps, all the
paraphernalia required to keep something
of this size standing and alive. Because, yes,
the flowers on this faintly Frankenstein-like
sculpture are real living plants, not good
fakes, and there are 50,000 of them, all of
which need food and water, pruning and
weeding. It’s been around for a while now,
having first debuted in 2000 at the Palais
des Papes in Avignon.
Talking about both Puppy and Split-Rocker, Koons said, “I
think the reason why people like them is because they deal with
issues of control.” This is a rare thing for Koons, to venture any
explanationabouthisart.Butnoticethathe’sactuallynottalking
about the art; instead he’s musing on the public perception of it.
Ask the public what they think about Split-Rocker, rather than
what Koons thinks they think, and the result is kind of cute,
a quick #splitrocker search on Twitter revealing it to be “my
favorite Koons piece” (@HailieDurrett), “#splitrocker is pretty
amazing up close” (@MaggieCouglan) and “it smells good too”
(@mel_bar). It’s Event Art, in other words, the sort of thing
that bypasses the need for critical commentary or endorsement
completely, like a gigantic Anish Kapoor sculpture or Olafur
Eliasson’s waterfall under Brooklyn Bridge. There’s an aesthetic
element. Or, put more simply, Split-Rocker is pretty.
[ CAPTI O N ]
above: Split-Rocker has
been on public display at
the Rockefeller Center,
New York. All of the
flowers on the sculpture
are alive andrequire
constant food, water and
pruning throughout the
duration of the installation.